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In May 2014 the elections watchdog group Democracy North Carolina issued a press release saying it had found four North Carolina legislators whose first name, last name, date of birth matched voters registered in other states.

Plaintiff's attorney Daniel Donovan asked Strach if she thought the four lawmakers were committing fraud. "I'd have to investigate," she said.

Nice dodge there, Kim. But it doesn't change the fact that Interstate Crosscheck is just another voter suppression scheme cooked up by Republicans:

A Dream Undone (New York Times) -- In 2008, for the first time, black turnout was nearly equal to white turnout, and Barack Obama was elected the nation’s first black president. Since then, however, the legal trend has abruptly reversed. In 2010, Republicans flipped control of 11 state legislatures and, raising the specter of voter fraud, began undoing much of the work of former N.C. legislator and state supreme court justice Henry Frye and subsequent generations of state legislators. They rolled back early voting, eliminated same-day registration, disqualified ballots filed outside home precincts and created new demands for photo ID at polling places. A new state voting law , the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University Law School, calls one of the “most restrictive since the Jim Crow era.”http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/29/magazine/voting-rights-act-dream-undone.html?_r=0

The school is scheduled to open in a couple of weeks. There were problems getting permits and construction started on time for land just north of the Waynesville city limits. As a result, the school is leasing space from the Lake Junaluska Assembly so they can begin operations. During the earlier land purchase, apparently the school's governing board failed to comply with the state's open meetings law, according to reporting in the SMN.

A public hearing on a discharge permit related to Duke Energy’s planned coal-ash cleanup has been moved to Aug. 6, a day later than originally scheduled.

Duke Energy is excavating and reburying 7.2 million tons of coal ash on the plant site to comply with a state law requiring the utility to close and clean up its coal-ash ponds throughout North Carolina. The Sutton plant was among the first on the list for cleanup because it has been actively leaking toxic substances into the groundwater and the Cape Fear River.

I'm not naïve, I realize the impoundments need to be "de-watered" before they can be dug up and hauled away. But just because the river is right there handy doesn't mean polluting it is the only way to go. They wouldn't be allowed to do that if it were a Superfund site, and considering the toxins involved, the only difference is in the name. Here's part of the NPDES Permit:

The North Carolina General Assembly passed and Deputy Assistant Governor P. McCrory signed legislation aimed at preserving Confederate monuments from corrective action. They offered ahistorical rationalizations for their actions, which Duke University professor Timothy Tyson concisely corrected.

McCrory: Budget surplus enough to trigger cuts to corporate taxes (Triangle Business Journal) -- The final numbers are in, and it appears the corporate tax rate is going down. Gov. Pat McCrory’s office reported Tuesday that final figures for the fiscal year that ended June 30 show the state has a $445 million revenue surplus. That’s enough to trigger automatic cuts to the corporate tax rate under the tax reform package adopted in 2013, McCrory says.http://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/news/2015/07/28/north-carolina-budget-surplus-fiscal-year-2014-1...

In his cross-examination, Plaintiff's attorney Dale Ho pointed out that eight states — Alabama, Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia — do not have pre-registration of 16-and-17-year-olds, same-day registration or early voting and prohibit counting out-of-precinct ballots. Ho asked Trende if he considered these eight states to be in the mainstream of U.S. voting laws. Trende said yes.

Ho then asked Trende if he realized all eight states had been placed under some form of federal election supervision before the Supreme Court struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act.
Trende said he didn't know that.

He should have known that. North Carolina isn't the only state that Republicans have targeted for voter suppression, we're part of a pattern. And that pattern was designed to be self-perpetuating: "Look at what these other states have done; we're just trying to conform." Chances are Trende actually did know, but chose to play possum. Hopefully the judge can see past this ploy, but he is a Dubya appointee, so...

This week Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) filed a motion to remove House Speaker John Boehner. This appears to be payback for Boehner's removing Meadows from a subcommittee chairmanship earlier this year. Meadows is also largely credited (or blamed) for the 2013 government shutdown. In the disastrous wake of that move, Meadows has vehemently denied any credit.

I wrote this blog entry over a year ago as a fictional retrospective on the 2010s from 50 years out and what it meant for LGBT equality. It occurred to me recently that much of what is written there has come pass, so I thought I'd look back at that checklist.

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